Boston Red Sox Fans Tear Down ‘Trump 2020’ Banner At Fenway Park

Boston Red Sox fans tore down a “Trump 2020” banner that other fans had brought into Fenway Park on Friday night, the day after several members of the team skipped meeting Donald Trump at the White House, Yahoo News reports.

Just before the sixth inning began, fans in the uppermost deck unfurled a red, white and blue banner that read, in part, “Trump 2020” and “Make America Great Again.” Within moments, fans from the deck immediately below had grabbed it and pulled it down, getting a standing ovation and loud cheers from the fans in surrounding sections of the park.

The incident happened a day after some members of the team declined to skip meeting with Donald Trump at the White House.

For the past few decades, it’s been tradition for members of a championship-winning team to visit with the president at the White House following their victory. While it’s nothing new for some members of some of the winning teams to skip the meeting for whatever reason, the Trump administration has seen more members of more teams skip the meeting. In fact, whole teams have been dis-invited because some members have publicly stated they won’t go to the traditional meeting.

The Boston Red Sox, who won the World Series in 2018, don’t appear to have been exceptions to that recent trend of some members of the team skipping out.

As CNN reported on Friday, on Thursday Trump hosted some of the World Series-winning players at the White House, but a sizable number of them skipped the meeting. In fact, the division between those who attended the meeting and those who skipped was largely along racial and ethnic lines; most of those who skipped were people of color, including several Puerto Rican players.

The team’s manager, Alex Cora, who is Puerto Rican, said in advance that he wouldn’t be going, and neither would most of his teammates who aren’t white. Boston sports columnist Steve Buckley, in response to Cora’s decision to skip the meeting, tweeted that it would be “mostly the White Sox” who would be going.

Similarly, former Red Sox player David Ortiz, who is Dominican, said last week that he wouldn’t have attended a White House meeting with Trump, if he’d been given the chance, due to the president’s stance on immigration, as he told The New York Post. “It’s like you are going to shake hands with the enemy,” he said.